The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (11 page)

No, Jeter did not let his mounting sum of errors ruin his Greensboro experience. The lost and homesick eighteen-year-old had slowly grown into this confident and independent nineteen-year-old.

Despite his age, Jeter was a credible leader. For 7:00 p.m. games he would arrive at War Memorial at 1:30 to do some soft toss and hone his inside-out swing as the Garth Brooks music blared on the stadium speakers. Jeter was almost always the first Hornet to arrive at work, even beating the team owner to the door.

Horshok was the owner of a local nightclub, the Rhino, and a carnival barker who knew how to create an electric small-time environment for his big-time prospect.

He booked concerts and Elvis impersonators and postgame fireworks shows and fired confetti cannons from the stadium roof. The team mascot, a giant red and blue wasp known as Bomber the Hornet, raced kids around the bases and always lost.

As executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Alumni Association, Horshok also kept a group of prominent friends that included Mickey Mantle, who showed up at War Memorial one day to shoot the breeze. The sixty-one-year-old Mick, who would soon seek treatment for his alcoholism, was en route to a golf tournament in Georgia, and he said his goal was to get there without having a drink.

“Hey, Mickey,” Horshok said, “you know who Jeter is?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mantle responded.

“Well, you’ve got to meet him.”

Mantle did not know the identity of any other Greensboro Hornets. Just Jeter. Denbo had Horshok ask Mantle if he would speak to the Hornets, and the Mick declined. He would only agree to talk to the teenager at short.

Horshok thought Jeter was destined to become a great player, he said, “so I wanted to make sure they met.”

The team owner pulled Jeter out of the group and walked him into a handshake with a Yankee prodigy from a different time and place. They met along the outfield fence, and Horshok stepped away so they could talk one on one, $1,500 bonus baby to $800,000 bonus baby.

Horshok saw Mantle doing the talking and gesturing, and Jeter doing the listening and nodding. Long before he roamed center field and swatted 536 home runs and secured a place among baseball’s all-time greats, Mantle had been a young shortstop who struggled with the burdens of great expectations.

They had a few things in common. Mantle might have been the most popular of Yankees, and Jeter clearly was the most popular of Hornets.

In fact, Jeter was just as comfortable with the townsfolk as he was with Mantle. He was a favorite of the team’s booster club, and with the locals who wanted to make him feel at home.

“You’d see him go to potato salad, fried chicken, and hamburger cookouts with fans, when he didn’t have to go,” Horshok said. “Derek bought completely into what the people around here were all about.”

Earl “Bubba” Clary was one of those people. A former placekicker at East Carolina and a sports nut newly divorced, Clary attended a businessman’s special at War Memorial and ultimately opened up his large three-bedroom home to any Hornet who needed a hot meal or a place to stay.

Matt Luke and the third baseman, Scott Romano, moved in, and Shane Spencer and catcher Tom Wilson followed. Minor leaguers strapped for money and living three or four to a small apartment suddenly had bigger and better accommodations free of charge.

Jeter and his roommate, Long, crashed at Clary’s for the final month of the season. At forty-five, Clary was a bachelor having the time of his life. He felt like the little boy he used to be, listening to Mantle play baseball on the radio. Jeter liked to call him Big Earl, and Clary would serve as the ballplayers’ middleman when they were trying to score female companionship for the night.

When attractive women asked the Hornets for autographs, some players would include Clary’s phone number with their signatures. “So after games we’re over here watching
SportsCenter
at eleven o’clock,” Clary said, “cooking some steaks on the grill, and the women would be ringing my phone. I was the players’ agent, and I’d take the scraps. When we had enough women over here, I’d take the phone off the hook.”

Only the 1993 Hornets were not exactly the 1986 Mets. They were a serious-minded lot hell-bent on winning the Sally League crown.

Ryan Karp, the lefty pitcher, was 13-1. Luke and Delvecchio provided the power, and despite his Gene Michael–tying 56 errors, Jeter was about to be named the most outstanding prospect by the league’s managers.

Even though he remained skinny enough for Long to joke he might break his wrist on a check swing, Jeter would hit .295 with 5 homers, 71 RBI, and 18 steals. But Derek was not about numbers. He was about chasing the championships that were out of reach at Kalamazoo Central.

The 85-56 Greensboro Hornets had a chance to win the Sally League in a best-of-five series with the 94-48 Savannah Cardinals, an older team that did not have a fast tracker like Jeter on the roster. The series went to a winner-take-all game in Savannah, “and I built it up into the Super Bowl,” Horshok said. “We had private planes down there, we rented banquet rooms, and the players got first-class treatment.”

The Yankees even offered the Hornets $1,000 a man as a bonus if they won it all. “And when you’re in low A baseball,” pitcher Mike Buddie said, “that’s a lot of money.”

Greensboro needed its money player. With his team down late in that Game 5, Jeter shot a laser into the left-center gap with two runners on. It looked like a sure triple, maybe an inside-the-park homer, at least until a Cardinals outfielder named Joe McEwing reached the ball.

Jeter had already started his sprint from second to third when McEwing slid into the ball and intentionally kicked it under the fence. “A brilliant play,” Buddie said.

Jeter was sent back to second base, a run was taken off the board, and Savannah would send the Hornets home with no trophy and no bonus to call their own. As much as the Yankees hated to lose any playoff series, even one in the bowels of Class A ball, they were excited about the fact that their prized shortstop rose to the postseason moment.

Jeter was Greensboro’s best player. He was so good, in fact, that the beat writer who covered Derek, Charlie Atkinson of the
News & Record
, approached Ogi Overman, the official scorer who helped Jeter make Sally League history with his 56 errors.

“You do realize,” Atkinson told Overman, “that Derek Jeter is going to hit .350 in the majors someday?”

Everyone was becoming a blind believer in Jeter’s bat. His glove? That was an entirely different story.

Over in Cincinnati, the scouting director who had picked Chad Mottola instead of Jeter in the ’92 draft, Julian Mock, kept throwing those 56 errors in the face of the Reds’ new GM, Jim Bowden, who had backed the scouts in support of Jeter. (Meanwhile, Bowden hated Mottola’s long swing from the first time he saw it, even if that long swing produced 21 homers and 91 RBI in Mottola’s first full year of high Class A ball.)

Many executives around baseball—including more than a few in the Yankee organization—figured Jeter would not remain a shortstop. In the middle of the ’93 season, Long sat down his teenage roommate in a diner and told him to prepare for a possible switch to the outfield. Long did not tell Jeter it would definitely happen; he told him to prepare for it to happen.

Jeter turned and shot him a blank look through those pale green eyes.

“I’m never moving from shortstop,” he said. “It’s never going to happen. Never.”

Derek Jeter had been hit by a pitch on the left hand, and so his instructional league orders were to play defense, and only defense, until Brian Butterfield said otherwise.

The coach was the son of Jack Butterfield, a widely respected scout and development man with the Yankees who had died in a car accident in 1979. For Brian this was a dream assignment, a chance to have a former draft class valedictorian in his fielding lab for thirty-five consecutive days.

Butterfield’s charge was clear: make sure the Yankees did not have to make their shortstop an outfielder. They started at 9:30 every morning at the minor league complex in Tampa, performed drills for sixty to ninety minutes, watched film of those workouts for thirty to forty-five minutes, and returned to the field to correct the mistakes found on the tape before Jeter played shortstop—without ever stepping to the plate—in afternoon games.

Butterfield thought Derek was too passive while receiving double-play throws at second and taught him to go get the ball. The coach changed Jeter’s approach to grounders, showing him how to present an open and relaxed glove.

“Derek looked like a baby Doberman running around,” Butterfield said. “Basically we had to break everything down.”

The coach rolled balls to Jeter’s left and right, hit fungoes at him, drilled him hard on slow choppers. Derek made the necessary adjustments so quickly and definitively, Butterfield said, “that toward the end of the instruction league he was taking a quantum leap.”

By the start of spring training in 1994, Jeter was ready to validate everything the Dick Groches and Hal Newhousers and Gene Bennetts had said about him at Kalamazoo Central. He actually knew how to field a professional ground ball, and he was filling out with the help of the Yankees’ strength and conditioning coach, Shawn Powell.

“The ugly duckling,” said Bill Livesey, the executive who drafted Jeter, “had become a swan.”

The Yankees needed to be right on Jeter, as they proved to be so wrong on Brien Taylor, the pitcher with the $1.55 million left arm. The previous December, while defending his brother’s honor in a fistfight gone awry, Taylor had shredded his labrum and dislocated his shoulder, and the doctors were fairly certain he would never again touch 99 miles per hour on the gun.

Jeter had a maturity and a sense of purpose Taylor never had, and Yankee scouts, coaches, and executives loved to say the shortstop had a “good face” or a “sincere face.”

Jeter had the right makeup, the loving two-parent home, and the clear commitment to be worth every penny of the Yankees’ $800,000 investment. But Derek was only nineteen, and a lot can happen to a teenager to rearrange that sincere face.

He would make ’94 the first special season of his professional baseball career. Jeter started the year with Tampa in the high Class A Florida State League, and before he shot through the minor league system like a comet in the night, a good friend helped show him how to perform off the field as well.

Out of upstate New York, the son of a former University of Maryland pitching coach, R. D. Long was a gregarious personality, a self-styled Charles Barkley inside Jeter’s tight circle of less conspicuous friends. Long was an athletic six-foot-one utility man known for his speed, and he was hard to keep up with from one end of Tampa’s anything-goes nightlife to the other.

Long went by the nickname “Hollywood.” He visited Jeter’s Kalamazoo home after the ’93 season and was taken aback by the way Derek’s bedroom was decorated. “It was wall-to-wall Mariah Carey posters,” Long said. “Like a little kid.”

R.D. assigned himself as the one to show the younger Jeter how to navigate the club scene. Up front, Long impressed upon Jeter the need to identify high-maintenance women.

“If that woman looks like a million dollars and puts it right in your face, that one you get away from,” R.D. told him. “That one in the corner who is quiet? That’s the one you go after.”

After practicing all day in the hot sun, after torturing their bodies some more in Powell’s weight room, Yankee prospects spent their nights indulging in the pleasures of the flesh. They were young and single, and the fact that they were recognized as potential millionaires did not hurt their batting averages in the clubs.

One prospect not named Jeter bragged about bedding nineteen different women over nineteen consecutive nights, a DiMaggio-like streak that few doubted. “We went out every night, going hard,” Long said. “And 8:00 a.m. would come, my eyes can’t even open, I’m telling myself there’s no way in hell I’m going today, and I’ve got Derek Jeter knocking on my door saying, ‘Let’s go.’

“Athletes, we are hunters by nature. We can’t help it. We are conquerors by nature. . . . And Derek and I hunted every night. But I saw him do his workouts on two hours’ sleep, and it was the most incredible thing I ever saw. Derek was a maniac in those workouts. He was a monster, and that’s why he was great. He was obsessive-compulsive regarding baseball preparation.”

No matter how much boys-will-be-boys fun the minor leaguers had in Tampa, Jeter never let any of it negatively impact his work or his goals. But yes, the young Yankees were neck deep in fun, enjoying their red-blooded American fantasy.

“One thing me and Jeter used to do was have him play the shy brother,” Long said. “I had to go in like a lion and push [a woman] back to Derek. We had good times, but Derek was always very respectful of every woman he’d meet.”

His looks ensured he would meet a lot of them. While in Tampa, Jeter once pointed at a model pictured in a magazine and said he wanted to date her. One Yankees employee happened to know the model, placed the wingman’s phone call, and weeks later Derek Jeter was dating her.

Jeter did not resemble that kid weeping in his hotel room anymore, wishing he had accepted the full ride to Michigan. He was tearing it up in the Florida State League, hitting .329 before leaving Long and other friends in his infield dust. Jeter was promoted to Class AA Albany-Colonie, where he batted an astounding .377 before playing his final thirty-five games in Class AAA Columbus, where he batted .349.

Jeter left a lasting mark on his old Greensboro and Tampa teammates when he flew back into town to support them in the Florida State League playoffs, but there was no turning back now.

He would finish the season with 50 steals, 68 RBI, 5 homers, and a .344 batting average, and he was named everyone’s minor league player of the year. He would pull off the rare jump from Class A to Class AAA in a single summer, in part because of his defensive work with Butterfield. In 616 combined chances at the three levels in ’94, Jeter committed 25 errors, or 31 fewer than he committed in 506 chances at Greensboro.